Last week on 17th July, after the attempted coup on President Erdogan, the New Yorker published an article, written by Eric Schlosser, on H bombs in Turkey. The premise of the article was to ask ‘How secure are the American hydrogen bombs stored in a Turkish airbase?’
“The Incirlik airbase in south-east Turkey stores NATO’s largest nuclear weapons storage facility… According to Hans M. Kristensen, the director of the Nuclear Information Project at the Federation of American Scientists, underground vaults at Incirlik hold about fifty B-61 hydrogen bombs—more than twenty-five per cent of the nuclear weapons in the nato stockpile. The nuclear yield of the B-61 can be adjusted to suit a particular mission. The bomb that destroyed Hiroshima had an explosive force equivalent to about fifteen kilotons of TNT. In comparison, the “dial-a-yield” of the B-61 bombs at Incirlik can be adjusted from 0.3 kilotons to as many as a hundred and seventy kilotons.”
The very weight of their metal presence, unexploded bombs. In short, it beggars belief! And this is supposedly the ‘sane’ world’s doing.
Dial-a-bomb
How deadly would you like your bomb sir?
100,000 people?
She’s already said –
in the House no less –
that she would push the button.
Or maybe sir would prefer
a few more kilotons
5, 7, 10 Hiroshimas?
Just twist this dial…
watch nations threaten terror too!
…
Think: how many people take their own lives without threatening others…
The World Health Organisation (WHO) estimates that each year approximately one million people die from suicide, that’s one death every 40 seconds. It is predicted that by 2020 the rate of death will increase to one every 20 seconds.
The reality of the sorrow, pain, heartbreak, bleak absence, of no return.
I share conversation over a late brunch, on global mental health and disability, by the river, Tower Bridge. We reflect on how to deliver and persuade mental health in the boardroom, and the work of Mental Health First Aid in England.
Walking back along the embankment, a father points and says to his son, ‘That’s the Tower of London, where Henry the Eighth lived, where he executed all of his wives.’
And I try to remember – was it Hampton Court? Divorced, beheaded, died, divorced, beheaded, survived…?